Jacques Marquette, born in Laon, France in 1637, entered the
Jesuit order in 1654 and was sent on a foreign mission to Canada
in 1666. Replacing Father Allouez at Chequamegon Bay in 1669,
Marquette went on to build the St. Ignace mission at Mackinac,
Michigan, in 1671 before being selected to explore the
Mississippi with Louis Joliet.

Marquette’s Final Voyage, 1674-1675

Earlier exploration in the western Great Lakes and reports
from by Native Americans revealed the possibility that a great
river drained either west or south of the region. These stories
continued to feed the hope that a northwest passage to the
Pacific remained undiscovered. French officials commissioned
Louis Joliet and Father Marquette to explore the region and to
claim that vast stretch of land for the French Crown. Count de
Frontenac, vice-regent to Louis XIV, saw this expedition as the
first step in creating a French empire stretching from the
Atlantic to the Pacific. As Joliet lost his accounts of the
trip, Marquette’s descriptions became the only record of this
historic expedition.

After returning from his trip down the Mississippi with
Father Joliet in 1673, Marquette secured permission to build a
mission among the Illinois Indians in 1674. He set off from
present-day Green
Bay, Wisconsin on October 25, 1674, despite illness. A harsh
winter froze the lakes and streams early, forcing him to stop en
route for three and a half months at the site that became
Chicago. Though he managed to spend Easter among the Illinois at
his new mission, Marquette was soon too sick to remain there
more than a few days and died on May 18, 1675, near the
present-day city of Luddington, Michigan on his return to the
St. Ignace Mission.

Document Note

This account includes Marquette’s brief journal of the trip
(from Thwaites’ Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents,
Volume LIX), and an account of the events that followed his
death by Claude Dablon, from a manuscript in the archives of the
College of St. Mary in Montreal.

English translations of the Jesuit Relations from The
Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, edited by Reuben Gold
Thwaites (Cleveland: Burrows Bros. Co., 1896-1901), Volume LIX,
have been published online at
http://puffin.creighton.edu/jesuit/relations/